Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  In the three days that separated Fibich’s announcement of his departure from his actual leave-taking, his mood underwent several inevitable alterations. The serenity with which the decision had been made – a serenity which he associated with the golden showers of the forsythia – gave way, as he knew it would, to dread, the dread to longing, and the longing to a homesickness which was more for the home he was leaving than for the one he intended, if possible, to recover. The day before his departure he was unable to keep still, would start up from his desk to knock on Hartmann’s door, then let his hand fall without knocking, so intimately did he realize that what he felt could not be shared with anyone, not even with Hartmann. In bed, on his last night, he lay rigid, sleepless, until his rigidity was interrupted by convulsive involuntary movements. Christine awoke. ‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you sleep? I’ll make you a hot drink.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let me do it.’ He was glad of an excuse to get up. He returned with a tray of tea and a plate of biscuits. She watched him over the rim of her cup, at last aware of something momentous. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘Must you go?’ Fibich summoned a smile of enormous cheerfulness. ‘Of course,’ he reassured her. ‘It’s only for a few days.’ But she noticed that his hand reached out for the biscuits until he had finished them, storing up sugar again for the terrible adventure ahead.

  They made love that night. ‘I have always loved you, Christine,’ said Fibich. ‘And I have loved our son. Please thank him for me.’ Then, all too soon, morning came.

  His plane did not leave until the afternoon. He went to the office as usual and surprised them all with his good humour. Staggering courage was required to keep the smile on his face: he felt as if he were to undergo an operation that might leave him for dead. This was the false cheer of the condemned, summoned up to leave a happy memory for those who loved him. And behind that smile the slow sad opening of the abyss, into which he thought momentarily that he might vanish. As the time drew near it seemed to him as if he might die before he got to Berlin. He felt layers of the life he had sought heroically to maintain as reasonable peeling away and leaving him as sorrowful as a medieval sinner deserted by his God, the God in whom he, Fibich, had never believed. Yet, as Hartmann drove him to the airport, he summoned up the smile once more, pointing out to him, as he might to a slight acquaintance, the flowering cherry in one of the gardens bordering the thundering road. Overhead a plane came in low to land. By the time that Hartmann left him he could only register two states, restlessness and homesickness. Yet he knew that his action, the action that had brought him to this echoing scurrying place, was ineluctable. In a corner of his mind he knew that one day he would be glad that he had taken it.

  Restless and homesick, he entered upon an altered state. The homesickness, he knew, he was attempting to sort out. The restlessness – and the realization came to him only slowly – would be with him to the end. That was what his life amounted to, he could see it now: he was doomed from the start to have his condition unchanged. And perhaps death was the only resolution he would ever be permitted for his insoluble lifelong problems. Perhaps death was that good thing that some pretended it to be: death as the end of longing. He felt, on this flight, among these nice people eating their cold meat and their rum baba, as if his life were drawing to a conclusion, as if it would not now be long before he was delivered. This pilgrimage, undertaken for Toto, to answer Toto’s questions, to furnish Toto with a lineage that would survive the death of his parents, was, he thought, a rehearsal for the real thing, the true homecoming. He expected nothing from it now, although he had undertaken it in a spirit of quixotry and what now struck him as absurd valour. He had intended to look for signs which he would relay to his son, but now, quite suddenly, miles up in the air, he lacked the energy to go through with it. He had no heart for what he had promised himself to do.

  Hartmann had shaken his head. ‘You are not a young man,’ he had said. ‘This is too much for you. Leave the past alone. How can you tell Toto what you do not even know yourself?’ But Fibich had still been possessed by the idea that the past would be returned to him as an illumination, and that that illumination would render him whole. Without it he must suffer the homesickness that had dogged him since his earliest days, the homesickness that had no end.

  He had thought, gallantly, that he must open himself to this experiment, after which he could take whatever rest was owing to him. One more effort, he had thought, and then my slate is clean: I shall not have shirked the task that has frightened me all my life. After that, nothing: the beatitude of complete repose, a life at home with those I love. For suddenly he loved them beyond measure, the little family that had kept him whole. He saw Hartmann’s face as he had last seen him at the airport: grave, uncharacteristically stern, his hand smoothing his now silver hair with a gesture that suddenly seemed that of an elderly man. By the entrance to the passport control Hartmann had taken him in his arms and embraced him, then had stalked off without a word. Fibich knew that he would be there to greet him in five days’ time. And Yvette would prepare dinner, for Christine would be too nervous. Perhaps Marianne would be there. But no, she was expecting another baby, and seemed to be unwell. And Toto? He did not think that Toto would be present. They did not see him often, nor did they expect to. Out of modesty they did not telephone, in case a woman’s voice answered. But sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, he would appear as if by magic, and sit with them quite peacefully, eating his mother’s cake at teatime with his usual appetite. He was studying them, Fibich thought: maybe he too knew that there was not much time left. What Fibich could not bear to see was Toto’s solitariness, which seemed now to be an important component of his uniqueness. He wanted to give him roots, a family, an inheritance, more than he had ever wanted such things for himself. He wanted, for his son, to be a man among men, and not simply the terrified creature he knew himself to be. And for this reason he was taking this journey, as a proof of his manhood, to earn the respect of his son, even if his son knew nothing of why this should come about. As far as Toto was concerned, Fibich was taking a business trip. Nothing of Fibich’s intention had been discussed with him. If there were a happy outcome Toto would know of it. And if, as Fibich now suspected, nothing was restored to him, then there was no need to burden Toto with the uneasy depths of Fibich’s autobiography. He must remember to buy them all presents, he thought. He was already looking forward to getting home.

  It was dusk when he reached Berlin, and a huge dark blue sky, moonless and starless, stretched over the curiously silent city. He realized that he was unaccustomed to these quiet wide streets, these blank-faced apartment houses with their austere windows, this isolation of a landlocked place far from the winds of the sea and the subtle odours of grass and river water. In the brief interval between the airport and the taxi rank he had noticed that the weather was unusually cold, had smelled only a faint aroma of petrol, had tasted nothing on his tongue. This atmosphere, this savourless air, was not in the least familiar to him. His taxi took him efficiently to the Kurfürstendamm, where the sky was momentarily obliterated by city lights, high buildings bearing advertisement signs like heraldic devices or the badges of ancient guilds, the outline of a ruined church which reminded him of a rotten tooth, and cautious tables outside cafés at which nobody sat. At the Kempinski the welcome was efficient, smiling, deft, but lacked, he thought, effusiveness. He surprised himself by responding in the same manner, having retrieved some kind of effectiveness from the fact that he had arrived at all. In his room he pulled aside the heavy white curtain on to a provincial calm interrupted only by the low rumble of a U-Bahn train. Suddenly exhausted, he undressed quickly, washed his face and mouth; with his last available energy he dragged his limbs beneath the white eiderdown, and fell into a deep sleep.

  His sleep was so deep, so uninterrupted, that when he awoke he felt peaceful and even faintly optimistic. He understood, from the silence, that it must still be very early, and yet he felt as if a great deal of ti
me had passed and that he had been transferred, with complete precision, from one world to another. He got up and took a bath, still in his becalmed state, dressed carefully, and studied himself in the mirror. He saw a tall thin grey-haired man with a faintly olive-coloured face, narrow slightly-hunched shoulders, and an enviably slender figure: despite his appetite he had never put on weight. The expression on his face surprised him, for his lips were stretched into a mild smile in which affability and innocence were exactly mingled. I am here, he thought, and I did not die of it. I will take breakfast and wander about the streets. Something is bound to come of it. And if not, it will not matter, for I have already done what I meant to do, taken the chance, returned. And if I find nothing, if absolutely nothing occurs, then perhaps I can go home a little earlier than I had planned. Yet this thought struck him as cowardly, although no one but himself had devised this test, the test that he had already passed. He looked at his watch: half-past seven. He thought it might be all right to begin his day.

  They treated him kindly in the restaurant, and his hesitant spirit, already reinforced by his success, seemed to revive. By half-past eight he was on the street, anxious to begin his experiment. A dense blanket of grey cloud seemed not low but high above the wide boulevard, where few cars passed and only the occasional businessman, prudently belted into substantial trenchcoat, seemed to be abroad. The silence amazed him, and also the grey air, so grey that it seemed to blur his vision. At wide intersections sparse knots of people stood obediently, waiting for the lights to change. The city appeared featureless, recent but already shabby looking; it had a grim worn look, dominated by apartment blocks of an unadorned nature, set down endlessly along broad streets. Only when he raised his eyes to the horizon, and to the roofs of the larger buildings, did he see signs of industrial or commercial life: banks and corporations raising their standards and their devices as they might have done in earlier days. He turned off the oppressive street and soon found himself in a vast concourse filled with hurrying workers. He recognized, without being told about it, the Zoo station. It was, he knew, the way to the East. At this he hesitated, lost heart a little, and retraced his steps. At the Kempinski he sat down again in the restaurant and drank another cup of coffee.

  Without entirely losing his new-found assurance he realized that his problem was that he did not know what to do with his time, or even what was expected of him. His age was against him, and the prospect of wandering about all day defeated him; in any event he had misjudged the size of the city, which was huge, unmanageable. Those apartment houses, stretching to infinity, the wide unconquerable streets, the rumbling trains, all filled him with bewilderment. He was forced to revise his original plan, in which he merely wandered, seeking landmarks: he was already tired and it was only half-past nine. Was he, then, to be a tourist, like any other? With a melancholy smile he went to the desk and bought a guidebook. What did tourists do in foreign cities? He supposed that they went first to the museum. He hurried out of the hotel, walked to a taxi-stand, opened the door of the first taxi parked there. ‘Morgen,’ said the driver, without turning round. ‘Morgen,’ said Fibich. ‘Dahlem, bitte.’ ‘Ja, bitte schön.’ Collapsing in the back of the cab he wondered if he were going to be able to manage more than the average tourist’s German.

  Ah, but Dahlem was much more like what he expected to remember, a suburb of silent villas painted yellow, with pitched roofs and green shutters. The museum, like a giant funeral chamber, rose among ragged tangles of bramble in corner beds untouched by spring, rusty relics of a petrified autumn prolonged into this early season of the new year. As he paid off the driver, and arranged to be collected in two hours’ time, he straightened up and breathed deeply. Standing on the steps of the museum and looking around him he courted recognition, but nothing came. Birds sounded muted, sad: under a sky of solid cloud, wide streets of cobbled pavements were void of any human presence. On the door of one of the houses he saw a bunch of balloons tied to the knocker. A child’s party, he supposed, and he tried to remember if he had ever had one. A schoolgirl, wobbling along on a bicycle, made him wonder if he had ever had a bicycle, and had ridden along just such a silent street. But nothing came, and he turned resignedly into the museum.

  He recognized nothing of what he saw: why should he? He wandered through the empty rooms, amazed that he was capable of doing so, that collapse did not seem imminent. He winced at the contorted, almost corrupt, nudes of the German school, at the agonized cosmeticized sculptures that had once adorned the altars of churches. When he smiled with recognition, it was at an English face that he smiled, at Gainsborough’s Joshua Grigby, alert and confident in his subtle pink coat, unthreatened by the rocks against which he posed or by the lowering grey sky under which he so aristocratically lounged. A fiction, Fibich knew, but what a reassuring one, and he gained a little courage from it. He wandered, the only visitor, through rooms in which the attendant stood up when he entered and waited politely for inspection to have taken place, so that he could sit down again. Fibich saw the vast stone heads of a brutal ancient culture, and in a darkened gallery blurred dancing Indian figures worn in places to a smudge, a trace. Then, when he could stand it no longer – for the range of sensation on offer seemed to him to stretch only from pain to indifference – he escaped into the street and started to walk.

  Lansstrasse, Fabeckstrasse. He walked, his feet twisting on the cobbles, to a stand of apparently dead silver birches. Summer and winter seemed equally distant in this mournful quiet. The Hansel and Gretel houses disclosed no inhabitants. He tried to find a shop, a café: anything to break this unearthly silence. He felt at home, and not at home. The only way he could judge his progress was that he was no longer homesick. He thought of Christine wonderingly, as if she were a stranger he had once known. He thought of Hartmann, whom he now saw to be lively, exuberant, festive, not stricken by this fatigue du nord which hung over Berlin. Hartmann, of course, was from Munich, an elegant and already southerly city. He understood Goethe’s longing for the sun and the slender trees of Italy. Yet Goethe was from Weimar and was surely spared the blankness that afflicted this place. He retraced his steps to the museum and with relief heard the taxi approach. He looked at his watch. Only half-past eleven.

  In the afternoon, already exhausted, he took another taxi to Charlottenburg. This was not familiar to him, although he supposed that he had seen the vast yellow palace before. He joined the crowd, put on a pair of felt slippers under the stern eye of the guide, and shuffled miserably through the ugly rooms with their coarse gilding and parvenu display of blue and white porcelain. Longingly he looked out into the gardens, composed of gravel and box; geometric parterres, carved into the red dirt, were destined never to be disturbed. He felt weighed down with fatigue, could not wait for the visit to be over. And this was only his first day! He took a taxi back, sat at the Café Kranzler, furtively ate two slices of strawberry shortcake. The rush of sugar to his bloodstream revived him, and he was able to walk back, on painful feet, to the hotel. There he asked for his key, hobbled now to the lift, and greeted his white room with something like pleasure. Hartmann was right, he thought. I am no longer young.

  He feared the night, with no one beside him to comfort him. But once again sleep came swiftly, a calm sleep of extraordinary depth, which, when he awoke, left him self-possessed, reconciled to this odd interval, as if, hour by hour, he were undergoing some test which, incredibly, he was managing to survive. A whiteness in the sky outside his window promised a lifting of that numbing cloud that had dimmed, hazed, and eventually weakened him the previous day. Again, he wondered what to do with his time but resigned himself, as he never thought he would be able to do: first breakfast, and then whatever the anonymous tourist did, for it seemed to him that he was no different. Outside the Kempinski coffee room the promise of a fine day had inspired the waitresses to unlock the chain that bound the iron chairs to the tables on the pavements. Was he, then, to turn temporarily into a stroller, a dilettante, sipping
coffee, watching the crowds? But no, he felt, that was Hartmann’s role. His was and always had been the harder part. He resolved to go to the East, to try, once more, to find that illumination, that shock of recognition that would tell him that he had come home.

  At the Zoo station he bought a ticket for Friedrichstrasse, momentarily frightened by the crowds. Among the anonymous Germans were noisy French tourists, Japanese students with backpacks. He reminded himself that he, a correct elderly gentleman, was not destined to be as free of association as they were: he felt lonely, not belonging to any group, unaided. If he fell ill, he thought, no one would come to his rescue. What was more, if he fell ill in East Berlin, no one would know who he was. Thus restored to refugee status, his mind sank to familiar depths of melancholy, as, standing in trance-like stillness by the doors of the shabby train, he watched the endless lines of apartment houses advancing and retreating down wide, quiet and seemingly deserted streets, crossing and recrossing like railway lines in the segmented landscape, which had the appearance of a huge deserted junction. At the Friedrichstrasse crossing point he was herded into a discordant queue, and was hard put to contain his rising panic as the line shuffled forward into the narrow glass pen where the visas were issued. Here nationality reclaimed everyone. The French laughed and smoked, the Japanese chattered and pushed, the Germans waited patiently. Fibich felt rather faint: this alienation, at least, he recognized. He recognized it as the feeling that underlay his habitual homesickness, and then he recognized the homesickness itself as the luxury that had replaced the raw and fundamental terror that had powered him from one country to another all those years ago. The homesickness, he perceived, might be what others felt, although cleverer minds dressed it up as nostalgia or replaced it with an attachment to childhood that was or seemed artificial. But for him it was not so easy to look back. And yet, if he were to learn anything from this excursion, it would be that although he was face to face with the terror and the alienation and the longing, he was nevertheless somehow still on his feet. He had not died of it.